(courtesy Harper Collins Collins Australia)
If there is one universal theme in the rich and varied storytelling of humanity, it is the need to belong.
Sure, we all want to fall in love, to know connection and find our village, but at the heart of all these story types, is the need to belong somewhere, to feel a part of a community and to matter.
It’s a deep and prevailing need in all of us, and while she doesn’t know it yet, it’s what drives Sophie Stevens to move to the Norfolk, England, seaside village of Mistingham where she discovers friendships, personal meaning and a sense of belonging that she thought, as an ex ward of the state, would never be hers.
As The Secret Christmas Bookshop by Cressida McLaughlin opens, Sophie is selling her handmade and in-demand journals through a concession in Fiona’s shop, her days of selling through fairs and stalls seemingly behind her.
Not only is her business thriving but Sophie has found real friendship with Fiona and Ermin, her husband, with local single dad baker Dexter and his daughter Lucy, with May and with a whole host of other people for whom Sophie is a warm and welcoming presence.
But Sophie is a restless spirit, years of moving around in the system conditioning her to believe that she should stay somewhere short-term, and that as soon as connections grow and he is bound into a happy web of belonging, that she should leave for supposed greener pastures elsewhere.
Sophie decided she would throw everything into the next two months, make sure her Christmas was as profitable as possible, so she’d have everything she needed to start afresh at the beginning of next year. The buzz of energy and excitement would come as soon as she had something concrete written down, as soon as she firmed up some of her ideas. She was sure of it.
As Christmas beckons, Sophie is beginning to get itchy feet again, with Cornwall, clear on the other side of the country beckoning, and plans for yet another barely-formed iteration of her life taking nascent form in jottings in the middle of her journal (where she reasons no one looks and her secrets are safe).
But then two key things happen – someone secretly gifts a lusciously beautiful copy of Jane Eyre, a novel she adores, and she volunteers, quite to her surprise, to organise the village’s annual Christmas event, Oakfest, alongside local manor owner, Harry, who is none too pleased to be part of a village he has shunned since his beloved father’s death.
No prizes for guessing for where all this will lead, but while the romance heartbeat of The Secret Christmas Bookshop is almost immediately obvious, McLaughlin does a superbly good job of weaving fractious souls into warm and loving ones, and showing us the power and richness of truly belonging.
There are bumps in the road, of course, because this is a romantic comedy aka rom-com, which all but demands it, but the unexpected friendship and then romance between Sophie and Harry feels warm and natural, their conversations sparkling and their connection quite real and palpable.
Reading as they come together in a way neither even begins to expect is a joy, imbuing The Secret Christmas Bookshop with that delicious sense of delight and surprise that comes from a particular situation suddenly finding itself becoming quite another.
(courtesy official Cressida McLaughlin Twitter/X account)
Happily, McLaughlin fills The Secret Christmas Bookshop with a cast of characters that come to mean almost as much as Harry and Sophie to readers.
While the novel is most assuredly about two lonely and adrift people finding a home and a potent place of real belonging with each other, it is also about the power of community and how it can shape who we are and who we become, and that an insular life is not one many of can bear for long.
And why would we want to?
While Sophie thinks of her life as better when she is alone and unconnected except in the most lightly civil of ways, the fact is that she is better off intricately webbed into life with others, as is just about everyone else in the village.
The fact that their journal of the power and richness of community takes place at Christmas is just a bonus.
We get the lights and the food and the ritual and the excited planning, but all of that means nothing, and The Secret Christmas Bookshop makes that abundantly and joyfully clear, without people around us who know us closely, care about us deeply, and who want the very best for us, now and always.
Sophie is still not convinced all this belonging is the way to go, even as she and Harry grow ever closer together, but as The Secret Christmas Bookshop progresses she, and we, come to transformatively appreciate how sweet it is to be known and loved … and to belong.
She waited for the panic, for her heart to try and beat out of its chest, leading the way to the exit, but there was only a gentle thrumming, a sizzle in her blood and a skip in her pulse that wasn’t terror, but anticipation. She was here, in Mistingham, and it was time for her to stop running.
McLaughlin is a accomplished talent at summoning a sense of festive time and place with The Secret Christmas Bookshop feel like a great big warm hug from Santa.
If you have ever felt like the season washes up and over, leaving barely a trace of tinsel or goodwill to all men, then reading a novel like The Secret Christmas Bookshop will remind of how wondrously good the season can be.
But while the lights and the snow and the festive sense of bonhomie and love is a good and perfect thing, McLaughlin is careful too to underline that the road to happiness, at Christmas and beyond, is not always an easy one, and while we may think accepting all that communal love and belonging is a no-brainer, Sophie especially struggles to see herself as a part of anything, let alone a village of people who love her.
While even new arrival Jazz, herself a product of the foster system, readily accepts what it means to matter to people who know you beyond a polite hello and a cheery wave, Sophie can’t accept that she will better within community, burnished by Christmas naturally, than without.
But this is Christmas, and the power of the season, of love and belonging to change hearts and minds and entrenched patterns of self-protective living, is powerful and by the end of The Secret Christmas Bookshop, well, let’s just say that after considerable ups and down, and long journeys of the soul, Sophie comes to truly know and love what it means to not be alone, and to belong in a way that will transform not just while Santa does his thing but way, way beyond.